Recently, I was asked this simple question; do I need to do anything differently when developing applications that will get hosted in cloud?

Before answering the question, my though process went something like this –

Well, cloud uses lots of commodity boxes; and failure is almost given. The application needs to take care of resource failures, meaning build fault tolerance. Besides, you may want to make use of additional cloud features (like if you are using AWS, then besides the EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFront, CloudWatch, Load Balancing, auto scaling etc) but if you are migrating an existing application then you need not do so in the first phase.